Runefox

Since the Winchester 1866 in Real Life is actually a rifle, making it use rifle ammunition rather than shotgun shells would solve that one pretty nicely. As for M240 ammo, I imagine getting an empty M240 box and then having to find the ammo would suffice. I do agree that ammo should be able to be broken down, but does the engine support that?

That kinda goes against the grain a little bit... Servers have a low enough player cap as it is without introducing something like that into the gameplay, and I also imagine it being a boring existence to not have any ranged attacks and being shot on sight by players. I guess if the map weren't 200+ square kM there wouldn't be a problem, but as it stands, I can't see that kind of gameplay working in such a wide open area.

That would be neat. Find a pen and paper (OR USE YOUR OWN BLOOD) and scribble a note. Probably text-only. It would certainly add to the RP element of the game, especially if you left a cache somewhere or had allies and left notes to meet up. I wonder, can the engine support this?

I don't know about those things in particular, but I can see this being somewhat relevant. 'Medic' skins and things like that would bring more class-based gameplay into the mix, and without much grounding in reality. Neutral things like having more pockets would be fine, but it would logically increase your temperature (when implemented) or lower your run speed. A "military" / camo skin would decrease your visibility, but increase your noise (army boots!). None of the skins should affect your character's skills at doing something - That should all be up to the player, in my opinion.

I don't have a problem with the nights being super dark, per se. When people turn their gamma up, I imagine that's what the night would look like when your eyes adjust properly. Frankly, after a period of time, I'd prefer it if that happened automatically. It isn't game breaking - Even with my gamma and brightness cranked, I still can't see straight through a pitch dark night, and especially not fog or rain, and especially not identifying friend or foe, but at least I can see mostly where I'm going rather than staring at black. The biggest problem for me is, night seems to take up a great majority of the day with very little in-between. I signed on last night and the server time was around 7:30PM - Pitch black. Same deal this morning when I signed on with a server time of around 8:15 AM. One thing I find helps combat the dark night is the HDR Lighting setting - Turning that onto High or Very High lets you see more shades in the darkness, which is absolutely essential. I went from seeing #000000 black with specks of #111111 all over the place for grass to being able to see blades of grass and other details.

So I've noticed that a lot of people, myself included, have been having issues connecting to the servers due to the DB server being overloaded. I think that with all these new players (again, myself included), a good idea might be to open donations so we can get a better DB server, or maybe simply more DB servers to handle the load overall. I know a lot of people bought ArmA 2 lately for the sole purpose of playing this mod, and I think a lot of them wouldn't mind tossing a few bucks in to get to play. Thoughts?

One way to deter that might be to log when a player enters and exits a server. If a player jumps servers in rapid succession like that, prevent them from returning to the original server until a certain amount of time has passed (an hour?). Still won't fix the problem, but should keep it from being a convenient option. To be clear, I mean: Enter server 1 Encounter barricade, leave Enter server 2 Bypass barricade, leave Attempt to enter server 1 is blocked because the player quit server 1 and entered another server too recently. The act of disconnecting and reconnecting shouldn't have such a penalty, because it's impossible to differentiate between a legitimate connection problem or crash and an abusive exit.

Hey, so, I'm brand new at the mod, so much so that I haven't even installed it yet. That probably doesn't do much for the credibility of this suggestion, but hear me out. I've been doing a lot of reading here on the forums, and I've been formulating some ideas that might help mediate some of the problems I've been reading about. At any rate, I haven't seen any suggestions quite like this one yet, so I'm just gonna put it out there. What I suggest is a balanced system that rewards players for doing certain tasks, with a certain degree of risk involved. Specifically, the following (and this applies to ALL players): 1) Groups of players - The more players in a given area there are, the more loot should spawn to support them (or, maybe the relative safety in numbers is enough of a perk, and scarcity of supplies makes for more interesting gameplay?). At the same time, the more players in a given area, the more zombies should spawn, and their aggro radius should increase for every person in the "party", to a certain maximum, to apply as a multiplier of any individual's visibility or noise. Realistically, this makes sense, since as a group there is more overall movement and noise that isn't taken into account by counting players individually. Zombies should be able to pick up on groups more easily. This makes the decision between travelling in groups or alone a tougher one, and one that has both pros and cons. Travelling alone equals less resistance, and a lower profile, while travelling together increases the relative safety of the group and amount of loot that can be found, at the cost of attracting more attention. 2) Killing players - Without regard to self-defence kills or as a PK/"bandit", killing other players should increase the aggro radius of the killer (the "scent of fresh blood" attracts more zombies). This effect should take the shape of a "survivor kills per hour" counter. The more kills per hour, the more aggressive zombies will be, and the more likely harder-to-kill zombies will spawn nearby (but with the added bonus of possibly carrying better loot, or guarding better loot spawned nearby). After an hour, the kill is struck from the counter, which lets the player settle back into normality. This adds more strategy to killing another player, and makes things more challenging, particularly if two 'factions' group up with the above effect and try to make war with each other. Should discourage that kind of behavior (but not deny the players the choice to do so). 3) Identifying players - This kind of goes back to the grouping bit. Would it be terribly difficult to be able to "group up" and identify each other by, say, an armband of a selectable colour? That would make things much easier to manage overall as a group. In a survival scenario like this, it wouldn't be too great a stretch to see survivors identifying themselves to each other this way when they group up, and it should help keep friendly fire to a minimum. Anyway, that's my first post. Hopefully that doesn't come off as too pretentious (and hopefully I didn't miss identical suggestions while I was reading through the forum), but I really see a lot of potential in this mod, and I'd like to see the realism maintained while enabling subtle effects like these to guide players through their survival experience.

:P The TF2 sniper quote fits here. Anyway, yeah. I see this mod as leaving as much up to the player as possible. Doing anything else risks breaking the immersion of the game.

I agree with Alex. Right now, players alone have the skillsets necessary to do all of these things without any hand-holding, if they themselves play the game enough. The actual player "levels up" the more they play the game. I don't think a game with the kind of immersion factor that Day Z provides really needs this kind of hand-holding. For any other game? Sure. It's just that Day Z is intended to leave as much up to the player as possible. I think it's best to keep it that way, because that's how the game continues to be unique.